Zimbra

It’s done. VMware has bought email and collaboration software developer Zimbra from Yahoo. Rumors of the sale have been floating around for some time now but the writing was on the wall when Scott Dietzen, former CTO of Zimbra, quit Yahoo last fall.
Dietzen joined Yahoo with the acquisition of the open source email startup in 2007 for $350 million. Dietzen went on to replace Brad… Read More

We’ve just learned that Scott Dietzen, VP Applications at Yahoo who worked on key products such as Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Answers, Groups, and Zimbra, has left the company. The surprising news comes on the same day the Sunnyvale company is announcing its not-too-bad yet not-excellent-either third quarter earnings.
Scott Dietzen joined Yahoo with the acquisition of open source… Read More

Google says the vast majority of the 1 million businesses that use Google Apps opt for the free advertising supported version. To make the free option less attractive they’ve been quietly lowering the number of user accounts that can be associated with a free account. Now as businesses grow, they’ll be forced to move to the paid version much more quickly than before.
Google Apps is… Read More

Zimbra, the collaborative webmail and calendar company that was acquired by Yahoo in 2007, has launched a new product for academic institutions called Zimbra Hosted that will allow schools to run their webmail portals from the “cloud”. Previously schools would have to run Zimbra’s service onsite or through third party hosting companies; now Zimbra will also give them the… Read More

Cisco is getting into the Web e-mail game with a $215 million purchase of five-year-old PostPath. PostWho? The company sells a Linux-based e-mail service to enterprises somewhat like Zimbra (which Yahoo bought for $350 million last year). PostPath is a fully functional in-browser Ajax client, and on the back-end it is trying to take on Microsoft Exchange. Cisco will likely add… Read More

Yahoo’s Zimbra launches version 3 of its open source desktop email client this morning that is designed to compete with Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mac Mail, etc. This is a new iteration of their browser-based offline product announced in March 2007.
Zimbra Desktop, which is built on Mozilla Prism, is available for Windows, Mac and linux machines. It weighs in at 40 MB, about double… Read More

Webmail in the educational market appears to be a three horse race between Zimbra, Gmail and Outlook/Microsoft Exchange. And today, Yahoo’s Zimbra won out against the other two in a bid to provide for Stanford University.
This is the latest in a series of victories for Zimbra, which includes Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Cal Poly, and University of Pennsylvania. Read More

Zimbra, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Exchange Server that was acquired by Yahoo this past September, has released version 5.0 of its collaboration suite. The upgrades are various and wide-reaching, with support finally here for the BlackBerry and several improvements made to Zimbra’s browser-based email client.
In addition to managing their email, calendars and contacts… Read More

Yahoo will announce the acquisition of open source online/offline office suite Zimbra this evening, we just heard through a very solid source. The price: $350 million, in cash, confirmed.
Our coverage of Zimbra goes back to 2005. They gained wide exposure at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference. Recently they launched offline functionality.
The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of… Read More

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Comcast is ditching its antiquidated webmail software and replacing it with Zimbra’s Ajax office suite, the companies will announce this evening. That’s good news for Comcast’s twelve million broadband customers, and even better news for Zimbra – this deal will significantly grow the number of Zimbra users from the current six million or so customers.
The deal also… Read More

Zimbra will announce a new offline client application, Zimbra Desktop, later this week. It will allow Zimbra users to access and use Zimbra’s email and other office applications, in the browser, when offline.
I spoke withZimbra Co-Founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj about the history of the company and the new Zimbra Desktop product this morning. Listen to the podcast at… Read More

We first covered Zimbra back in September 2005. Zimbra is an Ajax Microsoft exchange competitor with a webmail service that thousands of businesses and organizations use to handle email, contacts and calendaring. They also offer a great mobile solution. The core product is open source, and Zimbra has a higher end version that sells for $25 per person per year (with various discounts).
Since… Read More

What do Digg, Mozilla, the University of Bern Switzerland and the Times of India have in common? According to an announcement today, they are all among the 1000+ customers of web based open source communication and collaboration suite Zimbra.
Founded in 2003 in San Mateo, California the company today announced that it has passed four million paid hosted and on-site mailboxes. That’s… Read More

The Web 2.0 conference kicked off today with a number of great workshops. The highlights for us were the Attention Trust board meeting (posts below) and, of course, the Launchpad workshop where a dozen companies presented in an hour and a half.
My notes on each company are below. Many of these have been profiled here before, and we hope to get full profiles of the rest up as soon as we can… Read More

Company: Zimbra
Founded: 2003
Location: San Mateo, CA
We saw that really well done Ajax web applications like Writely can open people’s eyes to the future of the computing and the place that web 2.0 has in that future.
When you first view the Zimbra demo you may have a similar experience. Zimbra is, basically, a web based outlook/iCal/Thunderbird application in the same way that Writely is… Read More